Radius 81/110
January 22, 2012 at 10:52 PM by Dr. Drang
This old warhorse has finally come up lame.
It’s a Radius 81/110 one of the Mac clones that Steve Jobs killed off when he returned to Apple. This one aped the Power Mac 8100. It’s been in use in my company’s office since 1995. At first, it was my computer (my last Mac before going Linux), then it got relegated to accounting, where it’s been since 1997 or so. Runs System 8 and FileMaker 4.
A few years ago, I migrated almost everything off of it, but it’s still our main machine for one infrequently accessed database. Or at least it was until Friday.
I noticed it was running when it shouldn’t have been and the screen was faded (more faded than usual—its monitor may be older than it is) and streaky. After a bit of investigation, I learned that no one had turned it on; some fault in the system now causes it to run continuously as long as it’s plugged it. I turned it off by switching off the battery backup after selecting Shut Down from the—do you remember?—Special menu.
The faded and streaky video is, I’m sure, a symptom of its decline and not a problem with the monitor, but I can’t test that theory as we have no other monitors with that old DB-15 connector.
I could’ve sworn there once was a Radius logo on the front of the machine.1 It must have been stuck on with an adhesive that eventually gave out. But the logo is still on the keyboard.
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I put the Apple sticker on the side as kind of a joke. Not an actual joke. Actual jokes are funny. ↩
